Customer Reviews

Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World

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The previous reviewers have more or less agreed that this is an information-dense book, fitting a tremendous amount of knowledge into a compact narrative. I agree. I write only to add that the story it tells, in clear and elegant prose, is one that is almost unknown to the average educated American. The Roman Empire survived for over 1,000 years after the fall of Rome itself. The eastern portion of the Empire, governed from Constantinople, survived institutional weakness, the Persians, the Huns, the Goths, the Slavs, religious wars, almost a thousand years of attack from Islam, and the devastating impact of the Fourth Crusade that effectively destroyed the Empire as a major power, leaving only a shell of a state that weakened and diminished until the Turks finally captured the underpopulated and bravely but hopelessly defended city in 1453.

In a sense, the Eastern Empire was a buffer for the West. Without it, invasions from the east would likely have been more frequent and more consequential and the tide of Islam could well have entered Europe from the east as well as from the south.

The political narrative of the Empire is one full of tragedy and missed opportunities. The inability of the structure of its government to provide for peaceful, orderly succession (a common problem with several types of governments, including monarchies) and the amount of power held by the noble families meant that there was a great deal of political instability inherent in the Byzantine political system. This was increased by the importance of religion to the Byzantine civilization and the consequent destabilizing power of doctrinal wrangles (something almost inevitable with an orthodoctic religion). The riots over whether icons should be allowed or destroyed, the accession of emperors more devoted to religious study than maintaining the military forces that were all that stood between the empire and its many enemies, and the supreme suicidal follies that led to the disasters of Manzikert (where a substantial body of the army in effect stood by and watched as the Turks captured the emperor - a debacle that led ultimately to the loss of Anatolia and its transformation into the home of the Ottomans who finally annihilated the empire) and of the Fourth Crusade (in which a claimant to the imperial throne enlisted the Venetians to place him on the throne, a venture that led to the pillaging of the city and the destruction of the structure of the imperial government - a blow from which the empire never recovered.)

The cultural story, on the other hand, is one of preservation of the learning of ancient Greece and Rome and the carrying on of some of their traditions and inquiries. There is no single work that I know of that explores in detail the way that Byzantine philosophy, medicine, art, and creative writing moved forward from their Classical roots. To the extent that mainstream history notices such things, it notes Justinian's closure of the Academy in 529 and stops there. Leaving aside what Justinian actually did , see the discussion at http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Societies/Plato.html, this ignores hundreds of years of learning and discussion.

Wells's book offers brief look into the richness of this culture and into the way it influenced its Western (primarily Italian), Slavic, and Islamic neighbors.

It was a great pleasure to read so well thought-out and well-written a book. Those with an interest in this little-known but fascinating part of history will probably devour it as if it was a novel. I did. I hope that Wells has an in-depth cultural history of the Eastern empire up his sleeve. (And, no, I'm not Wells, have never met him or communicated with him, and have never heard of him before this book.)

Who actually saved Western Civilization? Authors have recently brought forth many claimants: the Irish, Islamic Spain, the Jews, homosexuals. One well-known author has written a semi-serious book titled "How the Plumber Saved Civilization". In "Sailing from Byzantium", Colin Wells makes a learned and convincing argument that the scholars of the Byzantine Empire deserve the true credit.

The subtitle "How a Lost Empire Shaped the World" may be an audacious one, but it gives the reader a good idea of just how comprehensive this small-format book intends to be. Most histories of Byzantium focus on either the military dynamics which slowly strangled the empire until only Constantinople remained and then itself fell to the Ottomans, or on the religious schism with the papacy that has not yet been closed. Wells treats those subjects well with fresh insights. But military and the religious divide play supporting roles to his true focus: the scholarly life of Byzantium and how it was spread to Italy, to Islam, to the Balkan nations and cultures, and, most vitally, to the emergent Russian power.

The author divides the book into three parts. In the first he covers both the preservation by Byzantine scholars of the fundamental works of Greek civilization and then the wave of humanist teachers that brought this learning to early Renaissance Italy. In his second section, Wells treats what was actually an earlier but not so permanent development: how the Arabs absorbed Byzantine learning as they conquered and settled in what had been Byzantine territory.

In Part III, the asserted civilizing power of religion takes a more dominant role as the author treats the interactions with the various Slavic migrations. His claim in the Introduction is that "the Byzantines turned the ... Slavs from uncivilized invaders into the great defenders of Orthodox Christianity." Of course the Russians were the most successful of these "Slavic invaders", and Wells' long discourse on how Russia came to be "the third Rome" could well be considered Part IV of the book.

While ideas and faiths are his main topics, Wells embodies and organizes his treatment by focusing on a long line of personalities. This is unavoidable, but the long stream of short biographical sketches of the key players, many of them unknown to non-specialists, could overwhelm. Thoughtfully, Wells has included for reference a list of "Major Characters" and a "Concurrent Timeline". This latter is especially helpful, as the text itself pays only minor heed to chronology. There is also a fine Bibliography, covering both primary and secondary sources. There are nine good maps.

Wells does not pretend to original scholarship in this book, but for most readers it will present many new and thought-provoking facts and interpretations.

A final note: although military history is not the main thrust of "Sailing from Byzantium", it cannot fail but touch on such events as they played such a large role in how Byzantine culture rose, spread, and fell. The reader may at times wish for a more comprehensive focus on this aspect. If so, I can recommend "Byzantium at War" by John Haldon.

For many of us in the West, Byzantium is an exotic mystery. Colin Wells opens up this mystery by outlining the crucial role of Byzantium in transmitting ancient Greek culture to three civilizations: the West, the Slavic East, and Islam. There is much in this history that is of relevance today as we reflect on the different roles played by these three civilizations that were shaped by Byzantium. Yes, the myriad of unfamiliar names and places are at times overwhelming; but Wells provides a list of major characters in his history to help the reader, along with a chronology and plenty of maps. For me and I suspect many others, this book opens up a previously neglected but crucial part of our history.

Make no mistake about it, Colin Wells is an interesting and engaging writer. The compact size of "Sailing" tells the reader right away that this is not going to be any Runciman-style multi-volume history of Constantinople, but a set of historical impressions of what the empire meant for other cultures. Still, let's compare it to Roger Crowley's "1453," which focused on the story of Constantinople's fall while giving a sense of its past. Crowley mixed linear story-telling with flashbacks in a very effective way. Wells bounces around with different foci, providing the briefest glimpse of iconoclast debates while diving deeply into hesychast squabbles of the 14th century - interesting, to be sure, but are the travels of humanists to the west worth as much detail as Wells wants to give it? In the end, I have the same problem with this as with many examples of "post-modern history" - very good vignettes, flashes of genius, but not a constant flow to give us a sense of Byzantium, even within the cultural confines Wells has set.

If you feel an unsatisfied curiosity about Byzantium, this book is actually a good place to start, precisely because it works from the outside, focussing on the external outreach whereby Byzantine language, culture, and literature reached Italy (sparking the Renaissance), the Muslim world, and the embryonic Slavic world. Underneath that story, the ebb and flow of Byzantium's fortunes, its dark age, and its periods of renaissant literature and religion are sketched lightly but vividly by Wells. This book offers a painless way to get your feet wet in this subject by placing it in a broader world context. After, you're ready for Cyril Mango's superb thematic intro "Byzantium" followed by the historical surveys of John Julius Norwich (short in one volume or long in two). Then, if you're still on board, you can dive into the deep waters of the great John Meyendorff ("Byzantine Theology" and others). Byzantium has been well studied since the 1950s; this book by Colin Wells will serve as your way in.

Ignorance of Byzantium (in two senses: lack of knowledge and lack of attention) has confounded Islamicists and Western European historians alike in the past 100 or so years. Colin Wells offers a concise and cogent description of the role Byzantium,including exiled or conquered Byzantines, played in the preservation and transmission of ancient Greek science and philosophy to the Muslim empires of the pre-Crusade "golden age" and directly to Western Europe chiefly by way of Italy. For nearly a thousand years, Byzantium WAS Rome, the hinge of civilization, linking rising and sinking cultures from the Visigoths of North Africa to the Vikings who called themselves Rus, from the humanists of Renaissance Florence to the Nestorian Christians of Syria, the primary translators of the Greek classics into Arabic.
Yet despite the significance of the material presented, it's a fun book, a quick read, written in a relaxed and simple style, accessible even to people who couldn't locate Byzantium on the map. (Hint: "Istanbul is Constantinople, now you can't go back to constantinople...")

Sailing From Byzantium (the title is morphed from Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium") is a wonderful introduction to Byzantine civilisation for the general reader. Byzantine studies are sadly ignored in the UK and America, but without this powerful Christian state the West would never have survived. Beyond history, the culture of Byzantium informs our own culture in many and varied ways, and is a joy to celebrate.

This readable history of the historical waves emanating from Byzantine influences is an indispensable work. The style is partly biographical sketches and partly telling of a story making it easily accessible and useful to novice and professional historian alike. The biographical flavor provides the structure for history as events involving human beings with complex characters and mixed motivations acting on the society in their time. The story-telling aspect provides the glue that sweeps the characters and their influence through their geographical dispersions to reveal their influence in Russia, western Europe, and Islam.

An enjoyable read for any historian looking for hints of the Byzantine in the world today. Well done.

I'd rate this book at 3+ stars, to be exact. It packs a great deal into a small volume, in offering many "big picture" lessons of the dynamics and heritage of Byzantine civilization, which continues to impact the world. But it also dishes out quite a few pages mired in trivial detail.

On the positive side, Wells summarizes the mechanisms, and--to lesser extent--the contours, of Byzantium's cultural influence on three of the five civilizations which (if one accepts the eminent scholar Samuel Huntington's thesis) will dominate the 21st century: Western, Islamic, and Slavic. (The other two which Byzantium never touched are Chinese and Japanese.) So the book is of interest for contemporary, as well as historical, reasons.

The strongest (and lengthiest) portions focus on the means and men by which classical Greek learning was transmitted from Byzantium to Western Europe and helped power the Renaissance. The next, and next best, portion of the book is its saga of how ancient Greek learning from Byzantium underpinned an Arab Enlightenment focused on science which went well beyond the Greeks, before being smothered by Islamic religious obscurantism nine or ten centuries ago. (Interestingly, the author traces Wahhabi extremism and its current Al Quaida offshoot to a leading reactionary Islamic scholar, Ibn Hambal, of the 9th century.)

Finally, the book offers an account of Byzantium's impact through eastern Christianity and associated culture in helping to form Slavic civilization, although--apart from generalities--the focus here (unlike in the other sections) is less on cultural than on political history, in particular the Orthodox Church's contribution to the rise of Moscow as the center of a unified Russian state.

These are large themes, offering major lessons, and Mr. Wells is stylistically elegant in conveying them. Much of the book is very well written.

On the negative side, for a small book it contains not only many broad lessons but also a quite a lot of boring detail. The latter falls into two categories: 1) capsule (yet still overly long) biographies of many cultural protagonists, which serve to illustrate their connections with each other and to Greek/Byzantine learning but nonetheless are too much "in the weeds" for a general history; and, 2)in the section on the Slavic World, excessive detail on the rapidly revolving door ("inside baseball") of Byzantine and Russian politics, at some neglect of the broader cultural themes so well addressed in the book as regards Western and Islamic civilization.

In essence, and remarkably for a relatively short volume, this book manages to have it both ways: many broad and worthwhile observations; but also considerable trivia. I recognize that grand history ultimately is the product of the sometimes modest stories of individuals. And in the thinly populated Middle Ages, specific individuals perhaps made more of a difference in cultural transmission. Still, I think that the author at times could have found a better "middle focus."

That said, why complain TOO much when the book is less than 300 pages long? What it does have to offer is well worth that read. And, beyond that, the author provides an excellent annotated bibliography with reading suggestions valuable to the layman who wishes to pursue Byzantine studies further.

While reading this book, I was overwhelmed by the density of names and events that grace almost every page of this scholarly work; it was rather confusing for me at times and required that I drastically slow down my reading pace in order to be able to follow what was happening and the sequence of events. This is most likely because of my nearly total lack of knowledge of detailed Byzantine history - religious, political, philosophical, social, cultural, literary and military - and its very numerous and important participants. Consequently, this book has much to teach people like me; I, for one, have learned much from it. This book appears to be a labor of love for the author who is obviously very well-versed in this branch of history. The writing style is quite clear and, despite the density of information, engaging. It would likely be of most interest to serious history buffs that have had previous exposure to, and an intense interest in, Byzantine history.